Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

Unless I Am Talking To Liz Phair

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I may have become slightly obsessed with Sasha Frere-Jones during the Performance to Production panel at the New Yorker festival as he dispensed his incredibly biting witin the form of sentences shrinking upon themselves with self-deprication.

(this is too giggle-inducing not to include: Sasha refers to panel-member Ric Ocasek as Ric “My First Album Is Better Than Yours, Unless I Am Talking To Liz Phair” Ocasek)

Apparently i was supposed to be in love with him already (said H), but i barely even knew New York media people even existed before i started reading Gawker so i can hardly be blamed. Having now idly investigated his writing for a month i’m even more charmed by him – he writes incredibly informed, typically obsessed odes that make every artist sound like his erstwhile favorite, and he sometimes avoids a review altogether in the interest of making his point.

Sasha has a very interesting picture-fueled scattershot blog that yields many interesting links, including a piece by a rejected queer eye and S/Fj’s lovely straightforward interview with Fiona Apple (whose album i have managed to hate less by not listening to the last five tracks).

Funny how straightforward interviews are always better than feature magazine articles.

Moveable.

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With Hemmingway on my lap i began to shed layers acquired since the night before.

Raining all week, people at work began claiming that they were depressed. I think rain just gives you time to realize why you might have been depressed in the first place. Having that generally figured out, i quite like the rain.

I peeled off my sweatshirt and stuffed it down into my bag to cover the bottle of vodka, still undrunk. I carry a grand’s worth of electronics on my body almost every day, but i am scared that someone might want to knock me down when i get off the train so they can take my vodka.

It is good vodka.

On Market everything is too beautiful. The bums, even. I draw deep, diaphramatic, atheletic breaths. These are not breaths i take on a daily basis. Forgetting the vodka, i feel drunk on crisp autumn air. Drunk on oxygen.

Ross asked me as i was leaving, “You’ve got to find something to do outside, huh?” I answered that i don’t know how to do anything outside, except walk.

So i walked home.

Sleeping in Theaters, on Trains

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We just saw The Corpse Bride. You know a movie was earth-shatteringly dull when the only thing Elise and I can find the discuss on the way out was the lighting. Inexplicably, it has a 81% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Spoiler-free Serenity review. We’ll be seeing it next Friday with Erika and Anthony next Friday.

I wish i could walk into one store that isn’t playing the new Kanye West album, but for that to happen i might have to discover the secret of time travel. I mean, i love Jon Brion as much as… well, probably more than the majority of people buying the Kanye West disc, but it’s not nearly as good as, say, the Tracy Bonham album.

Cute-but-obvious article on how Random Playlists aren’t Random (but are). Also: Virtual plague breaks out in World of Warcraft, and cannot be contained. Seems cool from a distance, but I’m sure I’d be annoyed if all of my heroes started dropping like flies. Hell, the Vahlizok disease was annoying enough. Meanwhile, a fascinating article on one of the first online communities: LucasFilm’s Habitat. It’s dry at points – for the funny anecdotes skip down to “Running the World.”

After two months, i still don’t have a functional ATM card. WTG, Citizens Bank. Must decide if i want to have drinks in NYC tonight but haul-ass to the train, OR leisurely hang out tonight but wake up at the crack of dawn tomorrow for same train.

Dispatches

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When whale sounds emerge from the cube across from me, it means Elib is listening to Coldplay. I keep trying to find something likeable on their CD, but all I hear are Chris Martin’s “soaring” vocals, which from across the row sound a lot like whale sounds. I feel as though Coldplay is Michael Bolton for the alternative crowd – seems so substantive and credible now, but no one will own up to owning them in a decade or two. I could be wrong.

My dreams have been the same for a week now. Each night I revisit some previous point of my life. Some nights it has been like Quantum Leap, in that I seem to be viewing the scene through some otherwise unsuspecting body. In one dream I flirted with my first grade teacher while first-grade-me was packing up his bags from across the room. I’m not sure whose body I was in; hopefully not my mother’s.

In case I haven’t mentioned it to you personally, Tracy Bonham’s new record is fantastic. It’s pretty much all I ask for out of a record: smart, playful, great harmonies, killer hooks. The fact that it will not sell a million copies is criminal beyond my comprehension. I saw Tracy just a few weeks ago and, other than my gushing at her like a mutant afterwards, the show was wonderful. She’ll be in Philly again at the TLA with just her bassist on September 30th splitting a bill with Aqualung. It should be mentioned here that her bassist is utterly fantastic and a great singer, so the show should still be terrific.

I’m finding it hard to focus on anything after a week of work – just sit here and stare at the screen. I don’t want to be that person.

Happy Birthday To This

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I have been blogging for over a fifth of my life.

Purely as a statement, it’s meaningless. Abstract. People will tell you that you’ll be asleep for a third of your life, or waiting in line for a seventh of it, but you won’t suddenly re-evaluate the way you’ve been living your life. People don’t find god in an attempt to save themselves from a seventh-of-a-life of waiting in line.

I have been writing this personal web log for five years. I turn twenty-four in less than a month. I have been blogging for over a fifth of my life.

That’s a little more succinct. It works in numbers that you may be able to grasp – you know what “five years” feels like, and you either remember what it was like to be twenty-four or you can imagine what you want to be doing when you will be.

Or maybe you can’t do either. Perhaps you’ve never done anything for five whole years – not live in one place, or date one person Perhaps twenty-four is just another meaningless milestone in the blithe fiction that is your imagined future – so you can’t relate to that either.

Also, there are the concepts of “personal web log” and “blogging.” What do they even mean?

I have been writing this personal web log (an internet-based, sometimes diary-like, irregularly updated collection of thoughts, feelings, links, pictures, music, and other online errata) for five years (one year longer than a US president’s single term in office, half of a decade, less than a third of the the time The Simpsons has been on the air). I turn twenty-four (twice as old as a twelve-year-old, one year shy of a quarter century, three years younger than Joplin, Hendrix, and Cobain were when they died) in less than a month. I have been blogging (“blog” n., short for “web log,” thus “blogging,” v., the act of creating and maintaining a blog) for over a fifth of my life.

Is that explanation thourough enough? How else can I more succinctly quantify this peculiar obsession to you? It is at once less and more than keeping a diary, more and less than a simple concatenation of thoughts I have and pages I view. It started out as a place to say something without editing, but soon evolved into a more oblique window into my life complete with its own voyeristic audience of hundreds. Sometime after that it became about documenting moments in time, snapshot stories of misadventures freed from the banality that surrounded them.

All of this attempted definition begs the question: what is it now? And: how can I hope to quantify something that I can’t even define? This is no longer my occupation, or my pre-occupation. Sometimes I only write once in a month, and other times I have a week’s worth of sentiments tied together with a common string. In the past this was the central repository for all internet statements, the me-archive. Now I sometimes want to publish a thought or a piece of writing that has no place here.

Ulimately, I have run out of pithy, charming, defining things to say on August 26th. August 26th now looms less as a day of celebration, and more of a mandatory mark on my calendar to remind me to remember, and to try to remind you, what this means to me. The date has become less like the birthday of a child over whom I dote and obsess and more akin to the wedding anniversary of a second-cousin – to whom I periodically send a card.

In either case, I thank you so much for being an inexorable, impossible-to-define part of this half-decade-passed … for being the eyes and ears receiving these words and sounds … for being a friend, even if you are a silent one. I may not be able to articulate my definition of what you’ve been consuming, but it couldn’t be whatever it is without you to observe it.

So, thank you. And, Happy Birthday To This.